Tehran, Iran, Jan. 31
By Kamyar Eghbalnejad – Trend:
A senior Iranian exporter has warned against a possible fall in the volume of the country’s bitumen exports due to growing prices.
“The government decision on pricing bitumen according to currency rates at the free market creates obstacles to the efforts aimed at exporting the product. If we fail to take necessary measures to remove this obstacle, our competitors will take our share from the market,” Hassan Tajik, a leading member of the bitumen commission at the union for exporters of oil products, told Trend.
The country annually exports 3.5 million tons of bitumen to 36 countries across the world including the CIS, Pakistan, Afghanistan as well as the Far East and Indonesia.
Describing the government policy on pricing the product according to the free market rates as a serious obstacle, he added that the decision caused a jump in price of some 70 percent since October 2017.
This is while the international prices have remained the same which would lead Iran to lag behind its rivals such as Japan, Korea and Thailand.
Iran has been living with two exchange rates for the national currency, rial, for several years, which according to many observers has hampered the cross-border trade.